It's
interesting that those with Hep C should not drink alcohol or take
illegal drugs. Check page 22. It's interesting that giving them
alcohol or illegal drugs excites or activates HCV and speeds up the
progression of liver disease. If the reason for giving them alcohol or
drugs is for health, then they are missing the boat. They are actually
increasing and speeding up their death sentence.

And then this from a friend..."I was thinking this morning that to teach a person who cannot control their
drinking how to get liquor easier and cheaper is tantamount to euthanasia."

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

DTES program teaches severe alcoholics to make their own alcohol, as a safe alternative

A Downtown Eastside program is aiming to help severe alcoholics take better care of themselves.
There
are currently 90 participants in the Portland Hotel Society’s Alcohol
Making Co-op. They form groups and for ten dollars they get all the
ingredients to make beer or wine, and then they can take home up to five
litres.

The members are all alcoholics, and most have spent their life drinking far worse.

“We’re trying to get them to come inside and try not to use such
dangerous alcohol, to use kind of safer alcohol,” said Mark Townsend,
executive director of the Portland Hotel Society.

He said many participants are used to drinking hand sanitizer, hairspray and mouthwash.

“Here
in the centre we have what we call a ‘Drinkers’ Lounge’,” Townsend
added. “To be eligible for any of the programs you have to be a member
of the Drinkers’ Lounge, so that means that you attend once a week, and
there’s [an] educational part of that and sharing of information, and
part of it’s community, bringing people together that are kind of the
lowest of the low on the streets and in the parks of this
neighbourhood.”

“From that flows the ability to put some money in,
with some of your friends there, and to brew your own alcohol, as a way
of trying to wean yourself off of less safe alcohol.”

One of the
participants, Rachel Eck, has fetal alcohol syndrome. To participate in
the program, she and others have to attend weekly meetings to learn
about their health and treatment options.
“I’m here to help our neighbourhood, our families, just to try and lead a healthy life without the rubbing alcohol,” she said.

“We just try and help out the struggling alcoholics out there.”
In the past the Portland Hotel Society has faced accusations of enabling addicts through its safe-injection site and crack-pipe vending machines.

But founders say the alcohol co-op is about harm reduction.

“I
think what’s hard for people to understand, they only see one half of
these things,” said Townsend. “You have to remember that this Drinkers’
Lounge or alcohol-maintenance program, is part of a continuum of things
that we do for detox and treatment.”

“What we try and do is the best we can do, facing the issues that we face.”

Another
part of the program involves getting participants to go out on to the
streets and check on others in the community, giving them fluids and
trying to convince them to come inside where it is warm and dry.

“Well
we have a set route, we go to where there’s quite often people who are
maybe getting intoxicated with drinking,” said program participant,
Patrick Mabee. “Because if you get to drinking those liquids you get
dehydrated.”

“So we try to give them cold water, and sometimes we
have, mostly just water, but today we have hot chocolate because it’s
cold out.”

“We get swarmed by lots of people, sometimes we only make it a couple blocks before we’re empty,” he added.

Mabee
said in the winter, the program is needed more than ever because most
of the fountains in the area are shut off, so the residents cannot get
water from there.

“And even in the winter, a lot of people ask for water, partly for themselves and partly for their dog,” he said.

Townsend said he knows this program is not solving the bigger problem of alcoholism in the DTES, but it is a place to start.

“That is
a very complicated problem to solve,” he said. “We wish we could solve
that problem. We’re involved in detox and treatment, we encourage people
to go to detox and treatment, but in the meantime we want people to be
that little bit safer. And this is a very complex problem. It’s not
something that affects a lot of people, but in our community it affects a
number of people that we want to take care of, we want to try and make
them feel safer and more at home.”

Monday, February 17, 2014

Pete Martin is in charge of quality control for MediJean.

Photograph by: Vancouver Sun
, 00027142A

As hundreds of B.C. companies clamour to become licensed
medical marijuana producers, a split is emerging among municipalities
over whether such facilities should be allowed on agricultural land,
confined to industrial areas, or banned entirely.

Municipalities are rushing to pass bylaws before April 1, when Health
Canada will no longer permit medical marijuana users to grow their own
supply. The only legal access after that deadline will be through
government-licensed producers.

This has led to a proliferation of medical marijuana companies
applying to Health Canada to become licensed producers. Of the more than
400 applications across Canada, about a quarter have come from B.C.,
Health Canada spokesman Sean Upton said.

To date, Health Canada’s website lists seven authorized licensed
producers of medical marijuana across the country. Two — Canna Farms
Ltd. and ThunderBird Biomedical Inc. — are based in B.C. Neither
returned calls on Friday. Canna Farms lists a Maple Ridge post office
box as its address, and ThunderBird Biomedical’s website says only that
it is based on Vancouver Island.

Any company wishing to enter the business must obtain a municipal license and operate in compliance with local bylaws.

One such company is Richmond’s MediJean, which has a license from
Health Canada to grow medical marijuana for research and development,
but not commercial, purposes.

MediJean has applied to Health Canada to become a licensed producer,
but their facility is located in a city that recently passed a bylaw
effectively banning such operations.

“There’s issues of land use, safety, security, water, sewer,
environment, and we’re not sure what we’re getting into,” explained
Terry Crowe, manager of policy planning for the City of Richmond. “So
what we’re going to do is prohibit them totally.”

Richmond and the municipality of North Saanich on Vancouver Island
have passed the most prohibitive bylaws around medical marijuana
facilities, while a debate is brewing among other jurisdictions about
whether such facilities should be allowed on agricultural land.

The Agricultural Land Commission stated in August that growing
medical marijuana is “consistent with the definition of ‘farm use’ under
the ALC Act” for land owners who are legally licensed to do so.
Municipalities such as Maple Ridge agree that this is the best place for
them.

Industrial land is relatively scarce in Maple Ridge, said Frank
Quinn, the district’s general manager of public works, and council would
rather see that land used for businesses that create jobs.

“An activity such as medicinal marijuana, from our experience,
doesn’t necessarily equate to a lot of jobs. You can have a large
building there with just a few people running it. It’s fairly well
automated.”
But other municipalities are taking the opposite approach, opting to
direct such businesses to industrial areas through zoning and keep them
off farmland. In December of last year, mayors of Langley Township,
Abbotsford, Delta and Kelowna wrote a letter to B.C. Agriculture
Minister Pat Pimm asking for “support in our collective desire to
prohibit establishment of medical (marijuana) operations in agricultural
areas.”

“It’s not that I want to stop it, but let’s treat it like any other
industry,” Langley Mayor Jack Froese told The Sun in December. “Others
see it as purely an agricultural industry, and that’s a difference of
opinion. We will be asking the minister to make a decision on that.”

The minister has not made any decision to date, spokesman Marc Black said in a statement Friday.

Delta has passed a bylaw restricting such companies to the city’s
industrial zones, and requiring them to apply for a rezoning permit.

“So that we have some idea where they’re located, that they’re not
sitting next to maybe ... a bakery or something that would not be a good
location,” said Delta Mayor Lois Jackson.

Meanwhile, Richmond has left the door open to amending its bylaw should the right application come along.

It is an approach that MediJean’s chief strategy officer, Anton Mattadeen, fully supports.

“It would be pretty difficult for any jurisdiction to suddenly wake
up one day and they have this highly stigmatized substance that they all
of a sudden have to deal with,” he said in a telephone interview from
Toronto. “Richmond’s decision to manage this with rezoning ... I think
is brilliant because ... it gives the municipality the ability to
basically eyeball every single company that wants to come in and operate
in this new industry.”

Richmond’s handling of MediJean’s application could set a precedent
for how municipalities regulate this contentious new industry.

Pete Martin, MediJean’s operations and quality assurance manager,
said the company has worked “hand-in-glove” with Richmond staff in their
current research and development operations.

Richmond’s Crowe noted that the facility is in an appropriately urban
and industrial area of the city, right next to RCMP headquarters,
“which is where you want to be,” he said.

MediJean’s rezoning application will come before council sometime in
the coming weeks, and at that time council will decide whether or not to
change their policy, Crowe said.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Canada's Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney does NOT back reports of Vancouver having a crack pipe vending machine.

He says "“We disagree with promoters of this initiative. Drug use
damages the health of individuals and the safety of our communities. We
believe law enforcement should enforce the law.

While the NDP and
Liberals would prefer that doctors hand out heroin and needles to those
suffering from addiction, this Government supports treatment that ends
drug use, including limiting access to drug paraphernalia by young
people.

We will continue to protect Canadian families and communities against the harmful effects of dangerous and illegal drugs.”

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Canada’s first crack pipe vending machines come to Vancouver

Kailin
See, director of the Portland Hotel Society's Drug Users Resource
Centre, shows one of the two crack pipe vending machines the
organization has installed in Vancouver -- the first of their kind in
Canada. Feb. 7, 2014.

A non-profit organization has installed the country’s first-ever crack
pipe vending machines in Vancouver in a new bid to halt the spread of
disease in the city’s Downtown Eastside.

The Portland Hotel Society has been operating two of the machines –
which dispense Pyrex crack pipes in exchange for just $0.25 – in the
Washington Market and the PHS’s Drug Users Resource Centre for the last
six months.

“For us, this was about increasing access to safer inahalation supplies
in the Downtown Eastside,” said Kailin See, director of the DURC.

Though many programs provide pipes for drug users in the neighbourhood,
it’s usually on a one pipe per person per day basis, according to See.
Vending machines allow addicts to purchase as many as they need, with
each $0.25 per pipe barely covering production costs..

“They don’t run the risk of then sharing pipes, or pipes that are
chipped or broken,” See said. “Everything from flu, colds, cold sores,
HIV: If you cut your lip on a pipe that someone else has been using,
there are risks there.”

Appearance-wise, the machines don’t look much different than a regular
vending machine. Covered in colourful polka dots, the only indication
these aren’t your run-of-the-mill snack machines is a blue sign at the
top that reads “PIPES” in bold red lettering, and, of course, the pipes
inside.

“It looks funny, and that’s kind of part of it,” See said. “It’s making
this not look like a scary or stigmatized thing. This is a very
important thing for the community and we thought we wanted to make it
look really snazzy.”

But it’s not all fun and games – the society hopes the machines will
spark a broader conversation about the positive benefits of harm
reduction.

“This is one piece of the larger puzzle,” See said. “You have to have
treatment, you have to have detox, you have to have safe spaces to use
your drugs of choice and you have to have safe and clean supplies.”
Mariner Janes, the manager of the PHS’ mobile needle exchange, said the
concept took about a year-and-a-half of production until the machines
were debuted.

So far, response from the DTES community has been positive.

“Through and through, the people that are using the machine and need
the pipes are kind of in dire need of the supplies, and really it’s a
health care kind of item,” he said. “The pipes on the streets themselves
can get very expensive, just because they’re kind of scarce.”

See said the machine at the drug users centre routinely sells out every week.

But beyond the borders of Canada’s poorest postal code, reaction may not be so favourable.

The federal government has shown its disapproval of harm reduction
measures when it tried to shut down Vancouver’s safe injection site,
InSite, in 2008.

InSite survived thanks to a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that upheld
the site’s exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

While the machines might only further the perception of the DTES as a
community burdened by drug addictions and mental illnesses, those
involved hope to see their popularity rise. They're the first of their
kind in Canada, according to the society.

“I have had some people say to me, “Ah, only in Vancouver,” Janes said.
“I’d like to think that this is not the only place that this could
happen. I’d like to see this idea go all over the place.”

A report published last year by the B.C. Centre of Excellence in
HIV/AIDS found that from 1996 to 2011, fewer people in the community
were using drugs and injecting drugs, and attributed the drop to harm
reduction methods.

The study also found that illicit drugs continue to be easily available
on the streets of Vancouver, despite policing enforcement efforts.

With files from The Canadian PressWHAT IS SO HORRIFYING ABOUT THIS AND STORIES LIKE IT IS THE ZEAL AND ENTHUSIASM FROM THE LUNATICS WHO PROMOTE THESE DESTRUCTIVE INITIATIVES. QUESTIONS NEED BE ASKED:WHAT PLEASURE CENTERS ARE ACTIVATED AND AROUSED IN THESE "HELPERS" WHEN THEY OFFER THIS KIND OF INSANITY?WHO CUSTOM BUILT THE DISPENSING MACHINE AND WHO PROFITS FROM IT?SOON WE WILL BE STOPPING PEOPLE RANDOMLY ON PUBLIC STREETS AND ASKING IF WE CAN OFFER THEM A FREE RYE AND COKE.David Berner, Executive Director

Thursday, February 6, 2014

For all those muddle-headed geeks who thought/think that opening up the marijuana floodgates in Colorado, Washington State and elsewhere is a groovy idea, check out this NBC report on the littl sidebars that are getting in the way of all the fun:

Endorsement

"All treatment centres in B.C. should get involved and support the Drug Prevention Network. As one collective voice we need to send the message that treatment works and it saves lives. There are recovery houses, treatment centers, private, government funded, long term, short term, detox, therapeutic communities etc. Let's help support prevention and help educate the public."